by Greg Rucka
“These are standard Work-For-Hire contracts and Nondisclosure Agreements,” the woman said quickly. “You cannot work here without completing these documents. Initial each page, then sign your name—your full name, please—on the last. Include your corporate authorization workforce number. Include your temp service’s tax ID number. Include your government personnel ID number. There are five openings today. They will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, with the best positions obviously given out first.”
There was an immediate flurry of activity as all of the temps raced to follow the woman’s directions, more interested in signing their documents than in actually reading them, which Jo understood was precisely the point. In addition to the basic forty-two-page WFH contract and the twenty-nine-page microprinted NDA, there were liability waivers, nonunion affirmation declarations, and a standard worker’s compensation abdication agreement. All in all, the stack came to 116 pages.
Jo timed it so she was the second person to deliver her completed contracts. She doubted that the temp positions were assigned first-come, first-serve; she couldn’t imagine pharmaDyne putting a temp in accounting, for instance, whose referrals indicated they were weak with numbers.
The young man took her contracts, and the woman consulted the PDA in her hand—much newer and sleeker than Jo’s own—then looked at her with a frown. “Thiesen?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Holcroft & Allan.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You understand legal filing and data entry, then?”
“Yes, I do, ma’am. I’m studying to be a paralegal, you see, and—”
“Good for you, we’re short-staffed in Legal, they’re on thirty-four. Edmund will give you your pass. Go out the door there, turn right, go to the second bank of elevators—not the first, the second—and head on up. Do not get off at any floor other than your destination. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Jo said eagerly. “Thank you!”
The woman shook her head slightly, as if bewildered by anyone who would be anxious to file legal documents, tapped at her PDA, and turned her attention to the next applicant. The young man handed Jo her temporary ID card, and she headed out the door, made the right, and found the second elevator bank.
She rode up to thirty-four, and six minutes later was seated in front of a terminal in a cramped cubicle, surrounded by towering stacks of legal files that threatened to topple and trap her in bureaucratic hell forever.
At quarter past ten she was given a five-minute break, and Jo used the time to find the ladies’ room. She locked herself into a stall, took the provided seat, and reached up behind her right ear to activate the dot-radio Potts had injected beneath her skin before leaving London. She didn’t fully understand the technology involved, but as the Armorer had explained it, the radio was being inserted without power to keep it from being detected. Once activated, however, it would remain on, with no way for her to govern what was broadcast and what wasn’t.
“Everything you say, miss, will transmit,” Potts had told her. “So pick your words carefully.”
Her words, he’d assured her, needn’t be more than a whisper, as the radio sat neatly against her skull, and would thus pick up the vibrations as much as true audio.
“Check, check,” Jo whispered. “Ahab, this is Starbuck.”
“Ahoy,” Jonathan Steinberg said. “Five by five.”
“Five by five, check,” Jo said.
“Where are you?”
“In the loo, if you must know. I’ll be in touch, Starbuck out.”
“I’ll be listening. Ahab out.”
pharmaDyne gave its temps forty minutes for lunch, and Jo passed on the offer, explaining to the supervising secretary that she wanted to work through the break. The secretary nodded in understanding and left her alone; Jo saw the look of mild amusement, and she knew what had brought it about. Undoubtedly, the secretary had seen hundreds of hardworking temps before her, each of them eager to make a good impression in the hopes of earning a permanent position.
She gave it almost ten minutes after the supervisor had moved off before stopping long enough to hoist her messenger bag onto the desktop beside the terminal. Throughout the morning, she’d made a concerted effort to identify and locate the surveillance cameras she was certain were watching her. She’d been able to find only two, which meant either that Legal didn’t warrant close scrutiny—which she doubted—or that she’d missed several. Assuming the latter as gospel, she proceeded as if everything she was doing was being watched.
Reaching into the messenger bag, Jo quickly flicked on the PDA, then removed the package of chewing gum. She popped a piece in her mouth, dropped the package back in the bag, and left the bag leaning against the side of her monitor. If everything was working the way Potts had assured her it would, the PDA would work as a sort of bridging transmitter, allowing Grimshaw to connect with her pharmaDyne terminal here in Vancouver from the safety of his computer lab back at the Institute in London.
“Ahab,” she murmured. “You’re alive.”
“Connecting,” Steinberg said in her ear. “It’ll take a few minutes before Ishmael can bypass the firewall and crack the security logs.”
“How many minutes?”
“A few.”
Jo thought Steinberg sounded unnecessarily testy, but resisted the urge to say as much. She worked through the file she’d just opened, pulled another from the stack, repeating the process, and then did it a third and then a fourth time. Finally, her rising impatience became too much to bear.
“Ahab, would you be so kind as to encourage Ishmael to move his ass, please?” Jo asked softly.
“Patience is a virtue, Starbuck—”
“So you’ve said,” she hissed, cutting him off. “But I’ve seventeen minutes left on this lunch break, which means I’ve seventeen minutes left to move around freely before someone asks why the hell I’m not at my desk. I presume you can see the benefits of doing this now, rather than at the end of the day, when everyone and their cousin will be stampeding like mad lemmings for the lobby.”
There was a pause before Steinberg responded. “Starbuck, keep further transmissions as concise and limited as possible.”
“Ahab,” Jo said, so quietly she could barely hear it herself, “go to hell.”
Nothing vibrating in her ear, no retort, no response. For a frightening moment, Jo wondered if Steinberg had cut her off completely, but almost as quickly she dismissed the thought. He wouldn’t hang her out to dry, not after his adamant arguments to Carrington about retrieving a lost agent.
“Ishmael’s in,” Steinberg murmured to her. “Stand by.”
She took a new file off the stack and opened it, running her eyes quickly over the top sheet, preparing to enter a new sea of useless information. When she looked to her terminal, ready to resume typing, she saw that the image on the screen had altered, that a small black-framed window had opened in the lower right of the monitor.
“Can you see it?”
Jo flicked the mouse to the window, bringing it up to the front while shifting her position in her chair, moving closer to the screen in an attempt to block any surveillance. The tiny window held a diagram—a map—and it took a half second longer for her to realize it was a map of the floor she was currently on, with a tiny white dot marking her position.
“Got it,” she said softly.
“Bingo,” Steinberg said. “Tracking is up and running.”
Jo felt a slight rise of relief, and realized that she’d been far more nervous than she’d thought. To cover it, she said, “Wonderful. Now, do you want to keep whispering sweet nothings in my ear, or are we going to do this?”
“Head for the elevators,” Steinberg said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Ishmael’s sending you a lift.”
Jo set the open file before her to the side, then raised her hands over her head, stretching, arching back in her chair, as if muscle-sore from the morning’s work.
&nb
sp; “Very convincing,” Steinberg told her.
Jo fought the urge to scowl. “You can see me?”
“Anything they can see, I can see. Get moving, Starbuck.”
She got out of her chair, taking a moment to reach into the messenger bag for her orange, and then, as an afterthought, scooping up three of the files. She tucked the files beneath her arm, kept the orange in her hand.
“Nice touch.”
“It’s important to accessorize.”
Jo left her cubicle, heading down the hall toward the elevators, with the direction and determination of a woman who knew where she was supposed to be. She passed a handful of other workers who paid her no mind, and then her supervisor, who was embroiled in a phone call at his desk. He caught her eye, mildly suspicious, and Jo held up the orange in her hand, and the supervisor nodded and immediately lost interest in her.
She caught some luck at the elevators, where she was the only person waiting, and almost immediately a car arrived, its doors sliding open.
“In,” Steinberg told her.
She entered the car, whispering, “Floor?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
The doors slid shut, and immediately the car began to drop so quickly Jo had a moment where she was certain she could feel her stomach trying to reach her chin.
“Peel it,” Steinberg said.
“Ahab, I hardly know you.”
“The orange, smartass.”
Jo bit into the orange, using her teeth to break the skin, tasted the sour bite of the rind. Quickly, she exposed the flesh hidden within, the whole car filling with the rich scent of overripe citrus. She let the skin fall in pieces, until finally enough of the actual fruit was exposed for her to tear it in two, revealing the acorn-sized metal sphere concealed within the hollowed-out center, the darkened lens of the drugspy visible on one side. She freed the sphere, letting the destroyed fruit fall to the floor, then used a fingernail to lift the thin sheet of plastic protecting the “eye.” She slipped the drugspy into her pocket.
While she did this, Steinberg continued whispering softly to her, his voice measured and controlled.
“Ishmael estimates thirty seconds until arrival. He’s bypassed the locks, you’re heading straight down. You’re coming out on sub-level five, the elevator opens directly on the first checkpoint, two guards posted, another six to eight making rounds. We’re timing arrival so you’re dealing with just the two at the checkpoint, they should have no idea you’re coming. Ishmael’s covering the cameras, don’t worry about them. Hit the guards fast and quiet, then use the’spy to hit the ones making rounds.”
Jo murmured that she understood. She slipped out of her shoes. They were low-heeled, black and leather, exactly the kind a temp would be wearing, and absolutely wrong for someone who might have to run and jump and sneak and fight. She felt the floor of the elevator vibrating beneath her feet, felt the cold of the metal seeping into her soles.
“Six seconds,” Steinberg told her. “Five, four …”
Jo positioned herself directly in front of the doors, inhaled sharply through her nose. The smell of the orange was rich and clung to the back of her throat, to the roof of her mouth. She felt her pulse beginning to slow, felt the smooth skin of the shoes in each of her hands, the slight variations in the leather beneath her thumbs.
The world began to dilate.
Steinberg’s voice came as if from far away. “ … two … one …”
The elevator stopped and the doors cracked, pulling apart as if reluctant to do so. Jo saw pale gray cinderblock opposite her, a metal light fixture affixed to the wall, the bulb caged behind silver wire. She saw the desk and the two guards working the checkpoint, one man, one woman, and neither much older than Steinberg, she supposed. She saw their uniforms, dataDyne black but with pharmaDyne’s gold and gray piping, and she saw them look up from their monitors, where they were watching the cameras, and she saw the surprise in their expressions. Whatever it was that Grimshaw-call-him-Ishmael was doing to the pharmaDyne security systems, he’d rendered them blind for the time being.
The female guard looked up from her console, and Jo stepped forward out of the elevator, smiling. The male guard began to turn in his chair, following his partner’s lead. The woman started to open her mouth.
Jo threw her shoes at them.
More precisely, she threw her left shoe at the man, her right one at the woman. She did this at almost precisely the same moment, perhaps the right leading slightly. Each throw was less a sidearm than a vicious snap of the wrist, and each shoe covered the ten feet to target as if it were a dart hurtling for the bull’s-eye. The heel of her left shoe struck the male guard just above his left temple, taking him utterly by surprise and sending him half falling, half sliding out of his chair, dazed. The sole of her right shoe hit the female guard in the nose, the heel smacking into the woman’s mouth. The female guard brought her hands up, started to cry out, and never managed it.
Jo followed in the wake of her throws, leaping over the security console and landing neatly between the two. She hit the female guard in the face, open-palm, knocking her out of the chair and onto her back, leaving her momentarily stunned, long enough for Jo to shift attention to the man. He was still dazed, just now beginning to realize what had happened, trying to pull himself up over the seat of his chair, straining to reach the PANIC button on the console.
Jo pivoted, brought her right hand down sharply to the back of his neck, and the guard sagged, slumping once more, then toppling off the chair to the floor. Jo twisted back, saw that the female guard hadn’t even begun to recover, knelt, and delivered a matching blow to her neck as she had to her partner’s.
She stayed crouched, listening, catching her breath.
“Shoes?” Steinberg asked.
“Bite me,” Jo told him, then freed the drugspy from her pocket and set it on the floor in front of her. “You go first.”
“Follow me,” Steinberg said.
Silently, the little sphere rose off the floor, tentatively at first, then higher, as if gaining confidence. Roughly the same size as a golf ball, the drugspy was a remote-controlled surveillance camera, propelled by a hyper-miniaturized version of the same null-grav technology that floated the new generation of air-cars.
During the mission load-out, Armorer Potts had not just shown her the device and how to operate it, but had then expounded at some length on the various modifications he’d made to it. Originally developed as a search-and-rescue tool—ideal for locating survivors buried in rubble from a building collapse, for example—Potts had added a closerange tranquilizer/narcotic delivery device and a sophisticated targeting system. The drugspy carried no more than a half-dozen shots, but each shot carried a sedative, “strong enough to drop a rhino,” as Potts had said.
Normally, the drugspy was controlled by the agent who deployed it, something that required the agent’s full attention, a risky proposition at the best of times. Since Jo had been inserted into pharmaDyne “light,” Potts had not been able to fit her with the requisite control systems.
Instead, the drugspy was being controlled by Steinberg, safe in the main compartment of the dropship as Calvin Rogers hovered it in its stand-off position. The plus side of this was that Jo could stay focused on her environment. The minus was that Steinberg couldn’t, and so could no longer provide the overwatch he’d previously supplied.
The little sphere bobbled, hovering for a moment before turning slowly in a full circle. When the lens focused on her for a moment, Jo stuck her tongue out at it.
“Maybe later,” Steinberg said. “Arm yourself.”
Jo hesitated, then nodded, checking the guards. Each of them carried a Global Armaments MagSec pistol in a holster on the thigh, with quickdraw packs for their spare magazines on their belts. Jo put the spares in her pockets and took the pistols in each hand. Beneath the security console, in a squat rack, sat two CMP 150 submachine guns, and a dataDyne-issue assault shotgun. She ignored them. dataDyne’s
weapons all pursued the same philosophy: opting for a greater volume of firepower in lieu of accuracy. The MagSecs were no exception, but she had faith in her ability to control them.
The fact was, despite hours that turned into days training on HoloMan VR or playing DeathMatch, Jo didn’t relish killing, didn’t even enjoy it. She had trained to do it because it was one of the skills her father had required for his work, and thus, one of the skills she had wanted to master to join him. Tools of the trade, Jack Dark had called them.
Until the last year, in fact, it had only ever been practice. Since that time, however, Jo had shed a lot of blood, and once or twice, had been happy to do it. That wasn’t a feeling she had wanted to examine too closely.
So she took the MagSecs, telling herself she would use them only as a last resort.
The drugspy finished its revolution, then rose higher, above the lip of the security console, tilting slightly as it began floating forward. Jo moved to follow, soundless on her stockinged feet, one pistol in each hand. The cement floor was cold and she could smell antiseptic and bleach in the air, and it made her think of hospitals and other unpleasant places; unbidden, she found herself remembering her nightmare.
Focus, Jo, she told herself. He’s no longer watching your back. It’s up to you, now.
They made their way forward, to the ballistic glass door that marked the exit from the checkpoint. The hallway continued for another two and a half meters beyond the door, then ended at a junction, corridors running left and right. Jo pushed open the door enough to allow the drugspy to float through.
“Wait here,” Steinberg told her. “I’ll clear the corridor.”
“Confirmed.”
Jo watched the little metal orb glide to the intersection, then it banked left and headed out of sight. She listened, still keeping the door slightly ajar, using the side of her bare right foot to prevent it from closing, counting off seconds in her head.
